Ayria - Plastic Makes Perfect - Day 10 of 10 Albums that Changed my Life

Ayria – Plastic Makes Perfect

Genre:  Synthpop

Year: 2013

Year I discovered it: 2013

My last album is Plastic Makes Perfect by the Canadian synthpop act Ayria, headed by Jennifer Parkin. Ayria is my favorite band with a female vocalist. I have a nice story behind this album too. Ayria released some singles before releasing the album itself, namely the song "Hunger", which in 2012 was one of the songs I showed my girlfriend Deborah when we first started dating. The following June in 2013, Ayria was playing at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, so Deborah and I took the BART train out there from Pleasant Hill and booked a hotel to stay in over night. It was a perfect night. Project Pitchfork was headlining the concert but really, I was just there for Ayria. We were probably one of the few who's whole reason for coming to the concert was Ayria, but still. The venue was nice, it was my first time really being in a gothic atmosphere, something I would get to experience more often in Florida when I went to The Castle nightclub. Ayria sounds just as great live as on the album, which can't be said of all singers. After the concert I bought this very album. The one that I got was a deluxe edition that had the album itself, and then two more discs of nothing but remixes of the songs, which are hit-or-miss but nice to have. It also contained a poster, and some cards and stickers. I had singer Jennifer Parkin sign it and she gave Deborah and I a hug. She was very nice and approachable in person. I'm just waiting for her to come down to Florida for a concert. The album just reminds me of that perfect night with my then-girlfriend now-wife.

I first discovered Ayria in 2010 when I ran across “The Gun Song” on YouTube. This was off her 2008 release Hearts for Bullets, which I bought a little later after hearing and enjoying more of Ayria’s music. Ayria quickly became the other band of my 20’s, second only to And One. You could say I should probably be talking about Hearts for Bullets on this blog, since without it I wouldn’t have gone to the Ayria concert and purchased Plastic Makes Perfect, but eh, I just have more memories tied to this album. Ooky Spooky wasn’t the first Voltaire album I had heard either or else I would have reviewed The Devil’s Bris. And I’m torn between Plastic Makes Perfect and Ayria’s debut album Debris as being my favorite Ayria album, to be honest, if we’re looking purely at the music and not the memories I have tied to the music.

The first track is “Hunger”, which as I stated I heard before this album even came out. It’s a song about being dissatisfied, hungry for more, and about losing the taste for all you loved. Depression will do that. I’ve gone through hard times where I just lose the desire to write, I lose my love for music, I just have all of the joy sapped dry from me. I’ll never forget the message Jennifer Parkin wrote on the inside of my CD case, lyrics to this song. I know she probably wrote the same thing on everyone’s CD, but I take it personally anyway:

“Don’t lose the taste for all you love,” she wrote. You know why I started this blog, really? All the sudden, seemingly out of nowhere? I felt like I was losing my love of writing. I felt hopeless. I felt like my writing was never going to reach an audience. It is so hard to get published. Literary agents get 20 queries a day, and out of that respond to like 10 a year. It’s like trying to win the lottery, getting traditionally published. You can self-publish, like I did with my first novel, but without the money to market yourself, you’re not going to reach much of an audience. I’m too poor to self-publish, the only people who buy my book is family and friends. I have so much I want to say, but no one will listen to me. I was afraid of fading away, being forgotten after I’m dead. My dreams were unattainable. So I decided, screw it, I’ll write what I want to say and I don’t care if I don’t make any money off my writing or if only five people end up reading it. I can’t give up. Writing is what I was born to do. I can’t lose the taste for what I love. If I give up writing, I might as well give up living. Sadly, I was born too late to be able to make a living off of writing. There’s too much competition, all the publishers care about is if your writing will be marketable and profitable, and my fantasy stories about ancient Armenia are just too outside the norm for people. They want the next Harry Potter, the next Twilight, the next Game of Thrones. My books are none of those things. Nobody cares about the stories I want to tell, no one but people who know me personally.

         Jennifer Parkin, Voltaire, Mortiis, all of these artists I admire, they are able to make a living somehow doing whatever the hell they want to do. Perhaps it isn’t easy for them either, but I so want to be like them. And why can’t I? What am I doing wrong? Is it society, or is it me? I can’t break through that glass ceiling. I’m stuck in call center hell with the other lost, broken souls who’ve had their dreams crushed into dust and blown away in the wind. Destined to be a soulless robot working for the corporate machine until I’m gone and forgotten.

            I need to go have a good cry right now. Damn it, I hate making myself cry.

Will all this ever be enough?
I don't want to hunger anymore.
Sometimes I lose my passion, forgetting all I loved.
Is this the best we'll ever know?
All my idols gave up long ago
I'm terrified I'll lose the taste for all I've loved.

The next track, “Big Plans”, kind of continues the theme of the last track. The singer has big plans for themselves, they’re running away from their life to the big city where their dreams are going to come true. “This restlessness can no longer be ignored. Too many setbacks, too many empty nights, stuck in this place, it just never felt right.” I definitely relate to these lyrics, in ways I just wrote about. I feel stuck. I’ve had too many setbacks, I’ve been rejected too many times. These lyrics just hit way too close to home, reading them now. I didn’t feel this way yet back in 2013.

Anyway, here we go, “All That Glitters”. I think this is a song about how everyone’s an asshole as a teen, and a lot of people just never grow out of it.

Been knocked out so many times
I'm scarred and broke and scabbed and bruised
But I'm still standing
And that will never change

Yeah, I got bullied a lot in Middle School, leaving me scarred for life. But I’m still here. Still alive. I didn’t let the bullies defeat me. I have a pretty low opinion of humanity in general though, based on my experiences. The song itself is catchy, but not really among my favorites. I like the lyrics more than the rest of the song. Still, it’s a nice confidence boost after the previous two songs. The next track is “Games”, which I’m not too sure what the lyrics are about. Reminds me of a sado-masochist relationship or something. Who knows, maybe in ten years I’ll really relate to it and it will drive me to tears. I don’t dislike the song, but I don’t really get much out of this particular track.

            The title track “Plastic Makes Perfect” is one I really liked when it came out, and one of the songs released as a teaser several months before the album dropped. “I hate that I like you, I hate that I’m like you.” I’ve never really had a relationship like that with someone, fortunately. I like songs with this kind of low-key angry energy to it, even if I don’t quite relate to it. It’s also really catchy. “Missed the Mark” is another song about bad relationships. I had a one-week “relationship” that barely counts in 2006, a five-month relationship in 2008 that ended before it could go anywhere, and then I had a girlfriend who I was very compatible with, married, and we’ve been together since 2012. My love life would make for a very short book, so that’s why I don’t relate to a lot of these failed relationship songs. Fortunately, I guess. But they exist for the people who do relate to them, and that’s a good thing.

            “The Box Under My Bed” is actually a song that ties into all of these blogs I’ve been writing.

I love when we sit and do nothing for hours
And put on music that reminds us of our past
The songs we loved since we met
We don't skip the sad songs
Time's gone by
Measured by the melodies that last

It’s like I’ve been talking about all along. Music is my life. My mix tapes are autobiographical. When I go back and listen to the music of my past, it brings back all sorts of memories, good and bad. Music has such a power. Without it, I would have no memories. If I lost my mix tape collection, I would have amnesia. I’d forget my whole life. But thanks to them, I can listen to a tape from 2000 and be 14 years old again, I can listen to the tape I made in Armenia and be on that trip again. I can listen to my newest mix tape and think about my present situation.

It's true
I have a tendency
To live in the past
But I hope
In the future
You're still here

“Friends or Enemies” is probably the angriest Ayria song. It’s a song that I dedicate to my enemies, either people I’ve met in person who I dislike, or larger-scale enemies. “It’s okay to hate your enemies. It’s either them or me. Just want to break their things. Is it okay?” Then again by posing the question “is it okay?”, it stops and makes you think. Does an eye for an eye make the whole world blind? Is it ever okay to hate? I hate Turkey for committing the Armenian genocide, erasing the evidence that Armenia existed on the lands they now control and denying their crimes. But is it really the people of Turkey I should be angry at? They can’t help that they’ve been fed lies by their government. Azerbaijan, out of bitterness over losing the war for Artsakh, teaches school children that Armenians are evil, denies any of the pogroms and massacres against Armenians they committed, destroys anything remotely Armenian in their country and claims it was never there, violates the ceasefire on a regular basis by shooting at border villages, killing several Armenian soldiers and occasionally civilians a year. But are they really to blame if they’ve been brainwashed since childhood? Hell, I was brainwashed in childhood into thinking marijuana was evil, and that if I got a Master’s degree I would succeed, and those were both lies. Anyone can be brainwashed. Hating is easy, empathizing is difficult. One is an emotional response, the other is logical. Even though this song has an angry energy and can be very cathartic to listen to when you’re angry at someone, if you look at the lyrics, I think these are the things Jennifer Parkin wants you to think about.  

The next song, “Three Months”, is about getting over a breakup.

I should have known you'd let me down
I know your kind and how easy it was
To shut me out
Maybe it meant nothing to you
It meant the world to me

This is a song I understand pretty well. It took me a long time to get over that second relationship I mentioned earlier. By the time this song came out in 2013 I had moved on, but I still remembered what it had been like. It felt like I had been used, my heart trampled, that the relationship had meant far more to me than it had her. I wondered if any of the breakup even affected her while we didn’t communicate at all for months afterward, while our mutual friends never hung out with both of us at the same time. It still hurt three months later, five months later, a year later. Basically, she’d confided in my best friend that she wanted to dump me, then acted very cold and distant to me at my birthday party, and after the party my friend, who didn’t want to prolong this charade, confessed that she was planning on breaking up with me but hadn’t decided on how to do it yet. Ah, fun times. Best birthday ever. So even though I heard this song five years later, it makes me think back to that. I’m over it now. Haven’t spoken to that woman in almost ten years now, in fact. Maybe I still bear a slight grudge over the whole thing all these years later, but it doesn’t keep me up at night or anything. I’m happily married now.

            The next song is my favorite off the album, “Big City Lullaby”. The singing is beautiful in this song. “Everybody wants to live their life in the spotlight.” Everybody wants to, but not everybody can make it. That’s the whole problem with me. Everybody wants to be traditionally published. I listened to this song a lot when I was living in Yerevan for a few months in 2015. It’s the biggest city I’ve lived in. I was hoping my time there would be a stepping stone, that I could move on into teaching and parley that career into becoming a novelist. I had so many hopes and dreams, back then. This song reminds me of that hopeful time in my life. Before…everything that happened after. Before reality came crashing in. I do want to live my life in the spotlight. But I must dwell in the shadows instead.

            “The New Style of Riot” is another song I don’t quite get, looking at the lyrics. It’s an angry song like “Friends and Enemies”, but not to the same extent. It’s very intense and energized. You can’t tell if she’s saying “If you” or “F-you” throughout the song, which I think is on purpose. The last track is “Letter From an Angel”. Jennifer Parkin blogged on her website for a while and she’d do song dissections. This song is a letter to her father, who’d died some years prior to this album’s release. He used to call her his angel, but she writes that she’s not his perfect angel. So sad. I’ll relate to this song eventually, but not yet, fortunately. It makes me wonder what impression I left on my grandparents before all four of them died. The only one who lived until I was an adult was my maternal grandfather Dean. I wasn’t fully matured at age 20 when he died, even if I believed myself to be. I wish they all could still be alive, so I could have real conversations with them. I wish they could read my books, see the person I turned out to be. Just to sit and have a cup of tea with any of them, just once. I guess that’s how I relate to this song. These are the thoughts it brings to my mind when I listen to it, even though I know the true meaning of the song and it’s not about me.

            As I said it came with two more discs, with remixes on them. It was a pretty nice deal, only a little over $20 if I recall. And Jennifer Parkin signed it and gave me a hug for free. Here’s all the swag that was inside:

That concert is one of my happiest memories with my wife. I’ll never forget our day in San Francisco, checking out a bar that was just opening, going over to the DNA Lounge where we had a nice jalapeno and mushroom pizza while we waited for the concert to begin while they showed gothic music videos on the TV such as “Blue” by The Birthday Massacre, that’s where I first got into that band. Project Pitchfork has some good music and this concert got me into them more as well, although I didn’t feel the same love for the fans from them as I did from Ayria. When their concert was done they just up and left, only reluctantly coming back for an encore, and then quickly leaving again. I mean maybe it’s just me, but they struck me as a little rude. BART would have been closed by the time the concert ended, so Deborah and I walked over to the hotel which wasn’t far. It was a wonderful day and night.

Anyway, I am done rambling about myself, hopefully you got some enjoyment reading these. If/when I ever write a memoir it will be very music-centric, probably based on my mix tapes, so this is like practice. Or maybe this blog really is my memoir. I think it is.

Here's some runner-ups who didn't make the list but still affected my life:
Kotipelto - Waiting for the Dawn
Stratovarius - Dreamspace
Rammstein – Sehnsucht, also Mutter
Oasis - What's the Story Morning Glory
Weird Al - Bad Hair Day (the first CD I ever owned)
Kamelot - Epica
David Bowie - Blackstar
Cradle of Filth - Midian
Dimmu Borgir - Death Cult Armageddon
Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory (yes as a teen in the early 2000's I'd be lying if that wasn't at least a runner-up)

Nine Inch Nails – Pretty Hate Machine

And tons of others. I might review all these albums someday, and others too. But for now, let’s turn to topics other than music for a while. I don’t know if I’ll post every day, but my goal is at least three times a week. Probably will more than that though for a while. I have an infinite number of topics.